


what were the words I meant to say before you left

by thatsparrow



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:27:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22182529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsparrow/pseuds/thatsparrow
Summary: "Jester?" he'd asked, even as he feared he already knew the answer. Still, never had he been so eager to be proven incorrect. "Jester, are you—""Nein, sorry." The voice from her mouth had been deeper, male, speaking Zemnian in an accent thicker than his own. Caleb's hands had stilled. "Not anymore, I'm afraid."--set during ep 83: dark bargains
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 4
Kudos: 49





	what were the words I meant to say before you left

**Author's Note:**

> title from "january hymn" by the decemberists

Later, in hours of open-eyed sleeplessness, Caleb will scratch at the silver lines of scar tissue on his arms and reconsider all that he should have done. He'll sharpen the memory against his regret until the edge is razored enough to open new wounds. When he thinks back, the seconds of that moment will seem to melt honey-like into minutes, but in truth, it all happened rather quickly. Would that time had been kinder to them all.

He remembers it in flashes, a chaotic sequence of images beginning with Jester reaching for the ruby in Nott's hand. A battle-opened wound on her palm smearing a new stripe of red against its surface. A shock of tension running through her arm as her fingers snapped shut around it in a rigor mortis grip, knuckles turned blue-white, tendons turned to ridges under her skin. Then, the sunburst of gold-touched magic that had swallowed her and the ruby both.

 _Please_ , Caleb had thought as the air went too-still around him. _Please, no_ — 

He'd moved to her side before the glare of the light had subsided, one hand hovering near her shoulder, the other waiting by her hip, ready should her legs give out from under her. And because he couldn't imagine moving an inch farther away from her—true generally, but particularly now—he'd been close enough to see in the after-burst that the sheen off the ruby had dulled considerably, and that the blue of Jester's irises had been painted over with a gilt shade of amber.

"Jester?" he'd asked, even as he feared he already knew the answer. Still, never had he been so eager to be proven incorrect. "Jester, are you—"

" _Nein_ , sorry." The voice from her mouth had been deeper, male, speaking Zemnian in an accent thicker than his own. Caleb's hands had stilled. "Not anymore, I'm afraid." Jester— _Halas_ , Caleb corrected—had blinked a few times, looking around the chamber with a sense of rapid appraisal. It was still Jester's face, which was jarring, but also distinctly _not_ Jester's face: an impression of tension held around her jaw, a new tightness at the corners of her mouth, but mostly the sense of distance and dispassion in her eyes.

"What the fuck is this?" Beau had moved forward to his side, close enough to bump elbows. "Caleb? Why doesn't Jester sound like herself? Since when does she know Zemnian?"

He hadn't known what to do with the hands he'd been holding ready to catch Jester, so instead he'd settled one on Beau's shoulder, trusting her to hold him upright when his own legs felt so unprepared for the task. "Because we are not talking to Jester, anymore." His voice was steadier than he'd expected when his chest felt as if it'd just been cracked open by an ettin's club. "Is she still alive?"

Halas hadn't seemed to have heard him at first, too concerned with taking in his surroundings and conjuring bursts of Jester's sky-blue magic to notice. "Hm? Oh, _ja_ , she's alive, but ah—buried? Dormant? Sleeping, is perhaps the kindest way to think of it."

 _Comatose_ , Caleb had supposed, would be the less kind word. 

"Can you bring her back?"

Halas had waved a hand, absent. "A simple matter. Will I?" He'd turned, looked at Caleb steady now with Jester's stolen face, gold eyes unblinking. "No—I don't think so."

Caleb had felt the impulse to call fire from his palms, to summon an inferno that would see Halas consumed, but he'd suppressed it, dug the rough edges of his nails deep into his palms to keep them from doing anything so foolish. However much pain he would've liked to settle on Halas's shoulders, there was no way of doing so without similarly harming Jester. "Pray tell," he'd said instead, jaw tensed to keep some of the bile held back from his tone, "why not?"

"I have a limited choice of vessel at the moment—very limited, currently divided between this body and the ruby." Halas had adjusted Jester's cuffs—the habit, Caleb supposed, of a man used to wearing wizard's robes. "While I can see that you are dissatisfied by my decision, given the choice, I think I rather prefer the tiefling."

 _The tiefling_. He'd stolen Jester's body and couldn't even be bothered to learn her name.

"What of your own?" The prone figure of Halas had still been stretched out in the center of the runes, waxy and still.

"The optimal solution to be sure, but whatever enchantment was keeping me within the ruby seems also to have severed my connection to my body. Until I can determine how to repair the link, that particular door is closed to me."

"Then what can we do to open it?" Even if magical barriers couldn't be burned down, they could still be broken open, could be sundered in two.

"We? Take this kindly, young wizard, but the spellcraft at play here is likely beyond whatever skill you've acquired. Not to discredit your accomplishments—to have found your way thus far into the Folding Halls is no small achievement—but this is a different, more delicate sort of work. Fortunately for the both of us, I have other vessels available to use in the interim, facsimiles of my original form." 

Caleb had thought back to the transplanted pieces of permaheart stored in jars around Halas's study, the corrupted clones decaying in their tanks. A new sense of dread stirred in his throat. "If those vessels were tied to the heart, then no, you don't. We destroyed it on our way here."

A series of expressions had crossed Halas's face— _Halas's, not Jester's_ , Caleb had decided, _not hers when there's so little familiarity there_ —first surprise, then a flicker of something akin to respect, before finally settling on annoyance. "An additional setback, one not immediately surmountable. Then, forgive me—Caleb, was it that they called you?—for we seem to be at an impasse. While you all have done me the service of freeing me from the stone, albeit inadvertently, your actions have left me with few alternative courses of actions. It seems I may be spending more time with the tiefling than I'd planned."

" _Jester_."

"Excuse me?"

"Jester, not _the tiefling_. You could at least show enough courtesy to call her by name."

Halas had pressed his lips together in a thin, not-quite smile. "Very well. Jester, then. It seems I may be spending more time with _Jester_ than I'd originally planned." 

Beside him, Beau had tensed with the mention of Jester's name. Caleb could only have imagined her ire in that moment, that mid-battle blend of panic and fury. But, like himself, she'd recognized that this wasn't a fight to be won with her fists, not so long as Halas played puppeteer with Jester's body.

"Is she in pain while this happens? Will she be hurt in any way by your presence?"

Halas had lifted one of Jester's hands, considering it. Flexed her fingers, then let them relax. "At the moment? The picture of health. And so long as I do not feel under siege by you or your companions, that's how she'll remain."

"If she comes to any injury—" Caleb had started, but Halas had only laughed.

"You'll what? Tell me, young wizard, how could you possibly hope to threaten me? What spell could you cast that I have not perfected centuries back, have not already invented my own permutations of? You are as a child at my feet and you think to challenge me to war?" Halas had drawn his shoulders back, pulled himself up to Jester's full height; even with her limited inches, he'd seemed to tower over the lot of them. "Understand me carefully, I have no intention of harming your Jester, but if you require me to choose between her wellbeing and my own, I'm can assure you that I won't find it a difficult decision to make. Nothing about this situation necessitates that we become enemies. Don't ruin that by being foolish enough to let your ill-conceived anger drive you."

Again, the impulse for fire-touched vengeance had risen high in Caleb's throat, but he'd held fast, swallowed it down. "Very well." The words tasted acidic, cowardly. "Then how do you envision us proceeding?"

"With very little _us_ involved in the matter at all. No, I'll retreat to my studies, research the best means of reuniting myself with my own body, and with any luck it'll be only a short while before we've put this matter behind us." 

Halas turned to leave the chamber, but Caleb had cleared his throat softly, closed his grip a little tighter around Beau's shoulder. "Indulge me, Halas, with a question."

He'd exhaled through his nose, quick, annoyed. "Yes?"

"What happens should the work prove not to be so simple? What if your research offers nothing but a series of dead ends?"

Halas had smiled again with that thin, razor-edged expression. "Whatever the future may hold, I will not be returning to the ruby. I leave it to you to divine what that should mean for the fate of the tiefling."

 _Jester_ , Caleb had thought again as his mouth went dry with the weight of Halas's words. With no further response, Halas had begun sketching the rune for a planar shift, and Caleb's mind had reflexively summoned the steps of a counterspell. It wouldn't have been bur the work of a moment, yet he'd let his hand lay still at his side. He'll spend the next several days debating whether that lack of action was the right choice. At the time, though, it had only been his own fevered thoughts at war with one another.

 _He'll kill us, or he'll kill her_.

_If they leave now, you may never see her again._

_We're not yet ready for this fight._

_You'd rather forfeit than face the risk?_

_We will save her from this. We won't stop until she's returned to herself—her and Yasha both._

The rune had hovered in the air like a ribbon of sky as Halas finished the shape, then twisted, flashed, carved open a rift in space for him to step through, to escape with Jester's stolen body and spirit. Still, Caleb held.

_I won't let you remain buried, Jester. I won't stop until I see the blue of your eyes once more. I swear it to any god that's listening, I won't leave you._

Then the rift had closed, and she was gone.


End file.
